David
Horowitz's Virtual Israel

First,
a comment about style. If there's one lesson I learnt from Jewish
history, it is this: never show tolerance towards racism. I wonder
what American legislation would have had to say if Mr. Horowitz
had written that African-Americans were a community of suicide bombers.
When he
writes  about the very people with whom I share a common land
 that "the Palestinians are a community of suicide bombers,"
he is a racist for me. This is why, unlike
Mr. McConnell, I refuse to address him directly. My only aim
is to warn the readers of him, not to engage in any communication
with him.

Having
said that, I wish to apologize to Antiwar.com readers for my article.
It was based on the assumption that Mr. Horowitz was writing about
Israel, the Palestinians and Jewish history. I now realize  his
reply makes it obvious  that his subject is Virtual Israel,
Virtual Palestinians and Virtual Jewish History. I stand corrected:
On these issues, the "Jewish Virtual Library" is indeed
the ultimate authority, and Mr. Horowitz is right to stick to its
virtual facts, virtual figures and to his own virtually Islamophobic
prejudices. If the Jewish Virtual Library mentions "more than
1,000" virtual Israeli victims between 1993-1999, it is certainly
more reliable than an Israeli
web-site listing names, dates and circumstances for each and
every of the 395 actual victims. The rest of Horowitz's narrative
is just as reliable; his main line of argument is insisting on his
mistakes.

This
was the point I wanted to make: Not only that Mr. Horowitz has no
idea of actual Mid-Eastern realities, but that he doesn't even wish
to have any. His facts are fictitious, his narrative of hatred is
a fairy-tale. He is an expert on the Virtual Middle-East (his "Islamo-fascist
Middle East"), and those who doubt it are either Nazis (like
the Palestinians) or Leninists (like myself). For information on
the actual Middle East, you'll have to look somewhere else.

A
final remark regarding the claim that I am an "ungrateful and
treacherous citizen of a western democracy." Mr. Horowitz failed
to notice that I live in Israel, not in Virtual Israel. Unlike the
virtual one, actual Israel is not a western democracy (I hope to
elaborate on that later); it's a pseudo-democracy run by a junta
specializing in war crimes but unable to give its own citizens 
including my family and myself  even a minimal sense of security.
I admit I am doing my humble best to change it. A non-Zionist American
Jew preaching Israeli patriotism to an Israeli: Horowitz's virtual
reality is fantastic indeed.